Using
Free Traffic Exchange
by: Jacob Jelling
These days internet has emerged as both, a market and
hub for marketing. Unlike the ‘brick and mortar’ world
where large manufacturers manage to squeeze out the
market bases of smaller companies, the internet provides
haven like the free traffic exchange. They are extremely
useful to those product and service providers who do not
have the advertising budget to compete with large
corporations.
Free traffic exchanges
can be described as opt-in-clubs, which only other
manufacturers of products and services can join. By
joining these exchanges, a member is obliged to look at
other members’ web pages. To gain membership you have to
submit in your website which then goes into rotation
with the hundreds and thousands of websites already
registered with that particular traffic exchange. (This
works best for people with high-speed internet
connection.)
These exchanges are
generally of two types – auto surf and manual. In the
former, the exchange automatically keeps on flipping the
pages in the web browser. In a manual exchange you need
to click on a graphic or banner control to change pages.
Most exchanges operate on the credit system. You gain
credit by spending time (for example, 30 seconds) on a
particular website. The more the number of sites you
spend time on, the more your credit. However your credit
gets reduced when another member visits your website.
With increased credit your website goes into heavy
rotation insuring a more effective and wider reach. You
can easily register with these exchanges. Most just
request some personal information and your URL.
However, you have to be
quite alert in choosing a traffic exchange that would
suit your business needs. Select one with many members
as this helps in getting more exposure. One factor that
is conducive to an effective exchange is demography. You
should insure that your business is similar to those
available on the exchange. Suffice it to say that a
manufacturer of handcrafted china won’t get out of an
exchange dominated by marketers of leather goods. The
drawback of this is that in an exchange where everyone
is offering similar services, you would have to work
harder to insure that your site does not get lost.
For beginners it is
always a good idea to join a few exchanges of both auto
run and manual varieties. You can survey the sites and
then decide which works best for you. However, it is the
manual ones which are better in the long run because the
possibility of actual sales is much higher. One of the
tricks of the trade is to use a multi-tab web browser.
The browser continues to run several websites in
multiple tabs while only one window is open for viewing.
You can easily surf many exchanges at the same time in
this manner.
